Saturday, June 15, 2013

When I see coaches kicking dirt and bellowing into
walkie-talkies, I remember my father standing quietly on the sidelines, arms
folded, watching the action with no apparent angst. The way he figured it, if a
team didn’t know how to play when the game started, it was too late to teach
them.

For him it worked. The map of Oklahoma is dotted with small towns where we
lived because he got a better offer. When he was in his eighties, middle-aged
men and women still called him “Coach.”

This tribute to my father was written for The Selma (California) Enterprise,
March 17, 1993. For Father’s Day this year I’m reprinting it with some minor
cuts.

Coach Lucas And The
Family Tree

The mail brought a copy of my mother’s family tree – the
McElhannon family on her father’s side. Our common ancestor was John
McElhannon, a will of the wisp who kept appearing, disappearing and reappearing
in 18th and 19th century records. We know that he came from Ireland about
1767. He fought in the Revolutionary War. Years later, he surfaced as a Georgia
landowner when he applied for his veteran’s pension, which eventually got the
attention of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

My sainted mother would have worn membership in the DAR like
a feather in her cap.

My father, I think, would laugh about all this, but with no offense intended.
Different as night and day, my parents were. Mother went through life making
waves. Dad just tried to go with the flow.

Mother was upwardly mobile before anyone knew what that
meant. She dreamed, schemed and worked like a plow horse to make things happen.
Dad seldom broke a sweat. If he ever worried, it didn’t show.

Maybe he already knew that life’s ups and downs come with
the kit, along with a little pair of boxing gloves to hang on your key ring and
a note that says, You can’t win ‘em all.

In today’s parlance, Dad was a jock. An old newspaper
clipping attests to his pitching arm, and he played semi-pro football for a
while. After he got married and started a family, he switched to Plan B and
became a high school coach. Whatever the job called for, he coached – football,
basketball, baseball, track.

Today when I see coaches kicking dirt and bellowing into
walkie-talkies, I remember my father standing quietly on the sidelines, arms
folded, watching the action with no apparent angst. The way he figured it, if a
team didn’t know how to play when the game started, it was too late to teach
them.

For him it worked. He had good teams and became upwardly
mobile in spite of himself. The map of Oklahoma
is dotted with small towns where we lived because he got a better offer. When
he was in his eighties, middle-aged men and women still called him “Coach.”

Dad was half-Irish and half-(Muscogee) Creek Indian. When he
died, we took him back to his hometown of Wetumka for burial. Tom thought it
would be nice to have the service done by a preacher who could speak the Creek
language. There was no such person within a country mile.

But an old cousin remembered the Creek words to “Jesus Loves
Me,” so we said goodbye with that. A slow rain had been falling all day and the
cousin told us that rain is a good sign because it washes away earthly
footprints.

It did seem fitting. The lovely man who was my father walked
lightly in this life. Maybe his kit also came with a note that said, You’re
just passing through. Have some fun.